“... and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They were also endeavours tinged with madness. How else could anyone persist with such fiendishly difficult work? The 11th-century Arabic text on ...”

“... in the path of all ‘life-writers’. In the introduction to his life of George Orwell, Crick said that most biographies were just dressed-up historical novels. They drafted a nicely shaped psychological plot for their subjects, and then – whenever the subject failed to follow that plot – twisted or invented the evidence with ‘she must have felt ...”

“... Matisse’s mysterious Persian Woman; Gauguin’s Still Life with Japanese Print; a photograph of Edward Lane in Persian costume; André Derain’s L’Age d’or, a pointillist scene of nude women in an unspecified exotic setting. There was something extraordinary about the notion that the museum might bring these Orientalist visions to Tehran, turning the ...”

“... Twin Towers and a metaphor for American victimisation is strange, even bizarre. The same could be said about ‘terror bombing’, a military term used in World War Two to characterise, for example, the US firebombing of 64 Japanese cities before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to speak of Hamburg, Dresden etc. All this was forgotten as ‘terror’ took on new ...”

“... to the authorities. Whatever, was Eisenstein’s feeling about that ignominious endgame. He said he had lost all interest in the ‘wandering ship’ the minute it ceased to be a revolutionary ‘asset’. Battleship Potemkin does not play by the narrative rules. Born in 1898 in Riga, then an outpost of the Russian Empire, Eisenstein enjoyed a ...”

“... Waller, ‘to improve the English tongue’. Nothing much came of this. In 1658, Milton’s nephew Edward Philips had published a New World of English Words which reached its seventh edition by 1720. Swift busied himself with the state of the language in his ‘Proposals for Correcting the English Tongue’ (1712) and elsewhere, hoping that ‘some method ...”

“... much of the up-front money (£7,500 to cover the first 25,000 copies) should be repaid ‘if the said Charles Dickens shall die’ or be otherwise incapacitated ‘during the composition of the said work’. (Presumably nothing had, in fact, to be repaid, since John Forster recorded that 50,000 copies were sold ‘while ...”

“... bearded ... rather shabby’ artist himself. Indeed, one might say of Lawrence, as Keats said of Shakespeare, that he ‘led a life of Allegory. His works are the comments on it.’ To the cultural historian, Lawrence’s almost allegorical charisma is of special interest because both his popular and his critical reputation have fluctuated so ...”

“... was positive. It would soon be a done deal, they insisted. That Friday, when the announcer said the Agreement had been signed, I felt a sort of cold hope: I remembered Sunningdale, the Loyalist Workers’ Strike, the collapse of the Power-Sharing Executive in 1974. At seven that evening, we reached the house of the friend we were staying with on Lough ...”

“... on their spiritual significance and indeed tells us what the Renaissance really meant. ‘I said just now that Signor Crespi’s portrait’ – a painting of a lady now in the National Gallery in London and agreed to be a Titian, but proposed by Berenson as a copy of a Giorgione – had a certain family resemblance to the one of the former Doetsch ...”

“... offered his ‘celestial bed’, a king-sized arena of sexual delight, to voluptuaries (so said his enemies) or to infertile couples (so said he, not a little disingenuously). The steep price of bliss kept the bed out of wide circulation. Sexual knowledge in the Enlightenment is, within its limits, pretty innocent ...”

“... the dying on the road to Magadan. The death certificate mentioned enterocolitis; other prisoners said many years later that he died in violent dementia brought on by starvation and disease. For a very long time, there were legends about him circulating in the Gulag, some of which reached those who had known him. Mirsky was supposed to have given 45 lectures ...”

“... a movement so variegated and fissiparous it might be better described as a tendency. It used to be said that puritanism fragmented over time: first the mid-17th-century schism between Presbyterians and Independents, the former desiring a national church and the latter self-governing congregations; then an explosion of exotically named sects ...”

“... was in the gift of the strongly socialist Countess of Warwick (who also doubled for a time as King Edward VII’s mistress), had been supplied with a revolutionary socialist priest, Conrad Noel. In the course of time Needham modulated from Anglicanism, which he knew to be a local phenomenon (‘because I happened to be born in the European West in 1900, and ...”